The Ajax Experience, Day One

So, finally, I'm at the first Ajax conference ever, The Ajax Experience. Held at the fancy schmancy Westin St. Francis hotel by Union Square in San Francisco. Arrived a day before the conference started, so some jetlag had been processed, but still pretty tired.

It all started with registration and then dinner. I managed pretty quickly to locate the only person I had met before, Joe Walker of DWR fame. With him sat Rob Gonda, another pretty famous Ajax person, so that quickly expanded my Ajax sphere by another 100%. I also met what most likely is the only Norwegian present at the conference, Geir Vidar Kristensen, working at Norsk Tipping (the Norwegian state lottery monopoly).

Later in the evening I managed to locate Matt Raible, with whom I before this evening only had conversed by email.

The Welcome & Opening Keynote by Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith was pretty funny, and contained some noteworthy items:

• They both believe Comet (also called Reverse Ajax by some, IIRC) will change a lot of things, since it allows for server push to web clients.
• They were talking about Fluxiom, released a few weeks ago. I guess it should be on my list of things to check out. Not sure really what the heck it is.
• Some effects are actually easier to do with Script.aculo.us than with Swing, which is pretty astonishing when you think about it.
• I'm quite sceptical about Flash, but they do have a point in that it is the only option if your application involves streaming audio or video. Can't do that with Ajax.
• Not much will happen in the near future that will change the boundaries of Ajax.

On Ajaxians wish list for future browser enhancements were:

• 2D drawing (Canvas)
• A JIT for JavaScript
• Better memory management, so that we can have 24/7 applications running with no memory leaks that requires a restart of the browser
• An off-line storage API, so that we can save data offline.

If these things were to be implemented by all browsers, then they believed most applications could be done in Ajax. There would still be cases where stand-alone applications made sense, but they would be niche products. The possible scenarios for the future are no doubt revolutionary.

Next up was an expert panel to which the audience could ask questions. Noteworthy was:

• It is good to know the basics of how the XMLHttpRequest object works, but people should not use it directly. Instead the panelists agreed that using a framework on top of XHR was the way to go.
• There are many tools coming right now, such as Selenium and various JavaScript development tools.
• IE 7 seems to be a disappointment to much of the Ajax community
• Who wins; Dojo, Script.aculo.us or MochiKit? Noone wanted to pick a winner. Peaceful co-existence was what people predicted. I think they were just chicken.
• A problem I haven't noticed before is that search engine spidering of Ajax applications is definitely a problem. Joe Walker on the panel even said an Ajax site might be banned by Google, since it might appear to the spider that you're messing around.

Anyway, that was the first day. Need to look up the session agenda for tomorrow to pick the right sessions. Too many parallell tracks!

By the way, I think there are less than 400 people at the conference. Probably around 300.